My scratchpad of life thoughts

Tag: starting

Ok, here goes. I’ve been thinking about blogging for a number of years now, longer than I’m willing to admit. I’ve finally created some world wide space for myself and here’s my first post.

I was reflecting today on what’s been holding me back, why haven’t I started this earlier. I think there are many reasons, most of which fall into some weird psychological categories of self-judgment, fear of others judging me, feeling like I don’t have a clear point of view or topic that I want to write about, feeling that I’m being pretentious and full of myself for writing about myself, thinking too much about what to write about, the list goes on. All of this is probably true to some extent with genuine reasons to censor myself in the interest of making this experience more bearable for the reader. And yet, it’s clear that I want to experiment more with my writing, and need a playground to play in. Not a step-by-step tour of the structured play area, but more like the sandbox that my four year old plays in. Where he sits and watches the sand pour down from one bucket into another, and then back to the other, with seemingly random purpose, but a clear unspoken intention. Where he might all of a sudden decide to make sand ice-creams and open an ice-cream shop, where he might argue about who gets to use the dump truck, where in one moment he might guide the truck through neatly created paths, and in another decide to taste those sand ice-creams. Mud in the face.

To cut through the noise in my head and state it simply – I’ve created this space for me to write, to write about nothing and everything and all the paradoxes in between, to write whatever I want to write, in whatever way I want to, without worrying about whether I’m using the right grammatical structure or sentence structure or whether my sentences are too long. Or too short. Or on topic or off topic. Or who likes what. Or how it makes me look. Or whatever. My hope is to regularly post stream of consciousness ramblings like this one, as well as poems, life stories, insights and nuggets from conversations, and whatever else feels post-worthy.

My mind often automatically orients itself toward trying to perceive how something I say or do will be perceived or judged. And yet, it’s clear from so many experiences again and again that magical moments have come along when I was least expecting them, when I was least prepared. When I certainly wasn’t trying to position or posture myself in a certain strategic way. So my honest attempt here is to just write whatever comes to mind in a sort of stream of consciousness manner. I find that so many of us (myself certainly included) spend so much time appealing to external expectations, to appearances, to labels and categories, to all the ‘shoulds’ in our heads. We cave in to the internal lizard voice that says – “you’re a technical PM, what are you doing writing poetry”, “you’re just a poser, a fraud”, “what will so-and-so think”, and on and on. It’s so ingrained. So both logically and idealistically speaking, it makes sense to carve out some place where I give myself permission to express myself in whatever way I feel like. Permission to write whatever is on my mind in this moment. Knowing that it might change or I might contradict myself or regret it in the next moment. Permission to write freely without needing labels or explanations.